To do good is noble. To teach others to do good is nobler, and less work.==Mark Twain

Most of the controversy over the Clinton Foundation is whether Hillary Clinton ever used her political position to so anybody a favor because that person made a donation to the foundation.

I think this would be hard to prove, unless I had the power to read Clinton’s mind and the minds of her donors.

I myself don’t think that Clinton or the foundation ever took a specific cash payment for a specific favor rendered. The gifts, like Clinton’s Wall Street speaking fees, are just a way in which the world’s rich and powerful solidify their relationships.

What Amy Sterling Casil and other investigators have shown is how little the world’s poor and needy have benefited from all this.

Charity Navigator, an organization that rates the effectiveness of charities, does not rate the Clinton Foundation because of lack of information. Casil contrasted it to the Carter Foundation, which does good work and is scrupulously documented.

Thomas Frank, with his usual incisiveness, explains in the current issue of Harpers why so many rich liberals such as Hillary Clinton and Melinda Gates endorse micro-lending.

It is a way of identifying the interests of American women who aspire to be corporate executives or partners in law firms with Third World women basket-makers and market-place vendors.

Merely by providing impoverished individuals with a tiny loan of fifty or a hundred dollars, it was thought, you could put them on the road to entrepreneurial self-sufficiency, you could make entire countries prosper, you could bring about economic development itself.

What was most attractive about micro­-lending was what it was not, what it made unnecessary: any sort of collective action by poor people coming together in governments or unions.